We’ll be breaking the isolation and monotony of the women in the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women and the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women (a prison next door to RCCW). Together these two prisons have almost 1,500 women, almost all of them mothers. RCCW is the state’s largest prison with 1,288 women including women’s death row.

Bring banners,drums, pots and pans, your voice, your love for those inside and your anger for the walls that separate us.

Mother’s Day began not just as a day to honor mothers, but as a day for mothers to express solidarity with one another and against the wars that left widows and orphans impoverished. This Mother’s Day, in honor of this tradition, there will be a day of solidarity with incarcerated mothers and against a penal system that disproportionately cages people based on race, class, and gender non-conformity.

Noise demonstrations outside of prisons are a growing tradition–a way of expressing solidarity with people imprisoned, sharing joy and celebration within struggle, and remembering those held captive by the state. Mother’s Day is, without exaggeration, the most emotional day in women’s prisons. Few imprisoned mothers will receive a visit from their children this year–let alone on this day. A noise demo breaks the isolation and alienation of the cell walls, but we cannot stop there. The captivity of women does not begin inside those walls, but rather with the threats of poverty and violence outside them. Liberation means an end to the abusive economic systems that devalue human needs and relationships, reducing our mothers to wage slaves and commodities for others’ profits.